


The Fine Art of Survival

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Dark Comedy, Drama, Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-06
Updated: 2012-10-06
Packaged: 2017-11-15 18:40:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/530447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The zombie apocalypse has arrived. Some individuals are better-prepared than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fine Art of Survival

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [Dark Month](http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/dark-month) – the wonderful [CallunaVulgari](http://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari) ensured that I would write the [rather particular fic](http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbclumW6Iz1rtyv64.jpg) I'd been promising people for ages. ^^
> 
> …and "zombie apocalypse" really means "unrepentant fluff that happens to have zombies in it," right?
> 
> Beware mild-to-moderate zombie gore! And much more than moderately foul language. XD

“You’re making it worse, you little _idiot_!”

“Who you callin’ so microscopic he’s smaller than the virus that caused this whole fucking thing?”

“ _Don’t use that tone with me!_ ”

“Don’t call me _sma_ —”

Ed hesitates as Teacher’s razor-edged glare goes hazy, and she starts hacking.  Fuck.

“C’mon,” he says, slipping his left arm under her violently-shaking shoulders and dragging her over to where he can high-kick the elevator button.  “We need to get to higher ground.”

“Should be refreshing for you,” Izumi gasps out.

Ed glances back.  The flagpole they wedged in to jam the front doors is holding off the horde so far, but the glass is starting to crack, and if the airborne shit gets through to Izumi, then… well, then there’s not a whole lot he can do with his right arm in shreds.

“What should?” he asks.

Izumi presses one hand to her chest and wipes the blood off of her chin with the back of the other.  “Being high off the ground.”

Ed starts the growl that’ll segue into a shout about injustice and statistics and the subjectivity of normalcy and _people who are just super-tall freaks_ , but then the elevator comes.

It’s weird and creepy that the elevator walls are plastered with fliers and advertisements for… all kinds of stuff.  Events.  Store sales.  Presentations.  It’s weird and creepy that although the elevator creaks and hums loudly, it seems to be operating fine.  It’s weird and creepy that the vestiges of humanity take the form of obsolete notices tacked to a bulletin board in a high-rise.

The elevator lets them out on the fourteenth floor.  Ed shifts his weight to help Izumi balance unaided again, the doors part, and they stagger over to the stairwell.  It’s one of those shitty, claustrophobic cement ones—cheap and dangerous both—but it serves its purpose of letting them out onto the roof.

“Right,” Ed says, steadying Teacher as she sinks down against the barrier.  The air’s awful for her; the smog and pollution and crap have cleared a little since a considerable portion of the population became undead, but her fucked-up lungs have to fight constantly to keep her from joining them. Ed doesn’t know what might be too much for her to take, and he isn’t eager to find out.  “Let’s fix a goddamn radio.”

His right shoulder is nothing but a tangle of wires and scraps of steel.  Teacher said she can’t repair their one chance at communication with alchemy unless she knows how the mechanisms work, so… so there they are, then.

Ed considers the nightmarish empty no-arm space, which Winry is going to _kill_ him for if the zombies don’t get there first, identifies a particularly sharp-looking shard of steel, and slices his left index finger open on the edge.  It barely even registers as painful over the way his head is pounding, over the feverish pulse of anxiety in his chest, over the constant battle to pin the panic down.  They’re going to find Al.  They’re _going_ to find Al.  The last time he cut his finger like this, he found Al even though the fucking universe incarnate tried to take him away.  This whole zombie apocalypse gig is peanuts compared to that.

He kneels—which requires a little wobbling; he’s weighted all wrong without the arm—and takes a deep breath and starts drawing a very detailed circle.  When the grit gets into the cut and the blood sort of clogs up, he has to nick his next finger, too, but since drawing with that one entails flipping the bird at the world in general, he’s okay with that.

“Teacher,” he says when it’s about as straightforwardly step-by-step as he’s capable of, “can you get up?”

Izumi clenches her teeth and crawls over.  “I’m not finished yet, you miserable child.  Where is the damn thing?”

Ed unhooks the battered radio from his belt and sets it in the center of the circle.  He examines the paltry remains of his awesome automail for a second and then plucks a couple choice wires, which he sets next to the radio transmitter.  If they’re very, very lucky—which they’re not, obviously, or they wouldn’t be here—the problem will be what he thinks it is, and this’ll be enough to make the piece of crap functional again.

“All right,” Ed says. “Moment of tr—”

“Don’t even,” Izumi says, and she presses her hands to the circle.

The light’s pretty rough on Ed’s swimming head—it’s really too bad they don’t have anything he could have eaten before, y’know, bleeding himself out all over the concrete—but when it fades, and he’s done blinking, the radio looks like somewhat less of a pile of shit.

Ed picks it up and balances it on his knee while he flips all the switches and twists the dial.  Izumi wheezes in a way that might be intended as encouragement.

And then he gets—

…static.

And—

“—d squad; repe—”

Ed shakes the receiver.  Which doesn’t help.

“—red rescue squad, over.”

“Fuck every color of your rescue squad,” Ed says.  “I want my fucking brother.”

There’s a very staticky pause.  “—lmetal?”

Ed groans like he’s already a zombie. “You have got to be fucking _kidding_ me.”

Even all the way out here, in the thick of _this_ , the bastard won’t leave him alone. That would be almost kind of comforting if it wasn’t such a pain in the _ass_.

“—port your loc—”

Ed shakes a little more.  “Damn.”

“—over.”

“We’re on the roof of Amberlyn Tower in South City,” Izumi says.

“—py that.  We’re heading in from the east.  Rendezvous at the ba—”

“Didn’t get that,” Izumi says.  “Did not copy or whatever it is you idiots say.”

“—at the base of the building, over.”

“No,” Ed says.  “I’m finding Al.”

“Fullmetal, that’s an orde—”

“Fuck you!  The world’s ending anyway; I fucking quit!”

“—der you not to quit, ove—”

“Fucker!”

— _dezvous_ , Major Elric; then we’ll look for Alphon—”

“Fuck your fucking rendezvous!”

“—enteen-hundred hours, Amberlyn Tower, ov—”

“ _You’re_ over,” Ed says, “’cause I’m gonna _end_ you.”

The line whines so ear-piercingly that Ed’s fumbled and turned the tuning dial before he even realizes his hand has moved.

Izumi’s face is completely neutral, and her gaze is on the radio.  “You know he’s right.”

“Fuck him.”

“I’m married; he’s all yours.  We have to be there.  We don’t—” Her voice and her eyes harden at once.  “Ed, we don’t even know if Sig and Al are still alive.”

“They are,” Ed says.

“We don’t—”

“I can feel it,” Ed says.  “I don’t mean that in some smooshy emotional way—I mean that I would _feel_ it if he was gone.  If his soul was gone.  I’d know if anything severed that connection.”

Izumi presses her lips together.  “And Al would never leave Sig behind.”

“Bingo,” Ed says.

Izumi sighs, coughs, and sighs again.  “Then I guess we’d better find them before the colonel sweeps in on a white horse at seventeen-hundred hours.”

“On a white mustang,” Ed says.  “ _Fuck_ him.  Okay.  We’re Al and Sig—where in the city do we go?”

 

 

Roy is trying to sleep in the backseat of the jeep.

It isn’t working.

Maybe if he tosses Breda and Fuery out the side.

“You know the real reason the colonel is gathering survivors?” Breda asks.

Fuery keeps his voice low; apparently Roy’s closed eyes and boneless slump against the door are convincing.  “Is trying to preserve the human species not a real enough reason?”

“It’s because he wants to collect everybody who’s left in one place and stand up in front of them and say ‘I _told_ you the Disease Control Bureau was a shitty waste of funds that could have gone to _my_ budget.’”

“Well,” Falman says, “strictly speaking, he was right.”

“That’s beside the point,” Breda says.

“I thought it was the whole point,” Fuery says.

“The whole point is that it doesn’t fucking matter anyway,” Breda says.  “We’re all dead men.  And dead woman; sorry, Lieutenant.  All that’s undecided is when.”

Roy sits up and stretches.  His spine makes an absolutely ungodly popping noise.  “That’s a very defeatist angle on the issue,” he says.

“‘ _Issue_ ’,” Breda mutters.  “World’s ending, and it’s an _issue_.”

“Speaking of which,” Roy says, leaning forward, “Lieutenant Havoc, you are hereby ordered to stop living like you’re going to die tomorrow.  Furthermore, you are expressly prohibited from dying tomorrow.”

“How about today, chief?” Havoc asks.

Roy snatches the cigarette out of Havoc’s mouth, takes a long drag, rolls down the ornery window, and pitches out the glowing remainder.  “No dying today either.”

“Damn it, Colonel, you _know_ this is my last pack—”

“I do,” Roy says.  “I also know that I may be the highest-ranking officer in the Amestrian military within the week, at which point pessimism will be a capital offense.”

For the duration of this conversation, Riza hasn’t moved from where she’s hunched over her rifle with the barrel tracking the horizon, but now she gives the smallest and thinnest of smiles.

“You’re sick, sir,” Breda says.

“That may well be,” Roy says, “but I’m alive.”

 

 

“I don’t like this,” Sig says.

“Me neither,” Al says.  “It’s a temporary solution.”

“Hmm,” Sig says.  He levels his shotgun, bracing it over his left forearm, and pulls the trigger; a zombie’s head explodes into gore and mush.  It drops to the ground and disappears beneath the crowd of slavering used-to-be-people milling around the city bus atop which they’ve taken refuge.

“Maybe they’ll get bored,” Al says.

“I don’t know if they’re capable,” Sig says.  Another rotting body tries to drag itself up the side of the bus, heedlessly using the jagged remains of a broken window as a handhold.  Sig huffs out an exhale, and then there’s the gunshot, and then the zombie has no head.  Al startles and clanks a bit, which is embarrassing even given the circumstances.

“Surely even the undead get bored,” Al says.  “And there must be _some_ other prey in this city—it’s huge!  There must be plenty of survivors.  I mean, I wouldn’t wish anything bad on them, of course, but—maybe someone will come by and distract this group long enough for us to pick up Brother’s and Teacher’s trail again, and then they’ll get away unscathed.”

“Maybe,” Sig says.  Another zombie’s head splatters into pulp.  It’s strange that Al can still flinch.  He’s glad of it; flinching is terribly, terribly human.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Al offers.  “For one thing, Brother is much too stubborn to die.”

He believes that.  It’s hard to keep believing that, as things get worse and worse, but he _does_.  Even though his last glimpse was of the automail tearing—he couldn’t hear the scream of steel or the howl twisting Brother’s mouth—and a flash of the stark red bandanna holding Ed’s hair back from his face; even though the sea of monsters surged between them; even though the absolute agony that stood out on Sig’s face when the chaos swallowed Teacher would have made a beating heart stop… Al believes it.  He has to.  And he does.

There is one thing in this universe that he has faith in, and it’s Edward Elric.

Unconditional.  Unbreakable.

But the longer they’re separated, the more it bends.

Because what if—

No.  That’s not fair.  It’s not fair to Brother to doubt him; it’s not fair to _himself_ to waste time worrying.  Whatever happens, happens.  He will do everything in his power to shape the outcome, and that’s all that anyone can ask.

A new zombie clambers onto a broken lamppost and uses it like a ladder towards the bus.  Sig makes short work of its cranium.  The rest falls limply to the street.

“I suppose,” Al says, “that we had better be too stubborn to die as well.”

“Suppose so,” Sig says.  “You have any more twelve-gauge shells?”

Al opens his chest-plate, and Sig reaches in to rummage around in the small mountain of assorted ammunition.  It’s a good thing Al doesn’t have a face; it’d be on _fire_.

Watching Sig’s huge hands deftly working the new shells into the chamber, though…

“I have an idea,” Al says.  “Can you clear me space to jump down?”

“This sounds like the kind of idea your brother would kill me for,” Sig says.

“Serious maiming at worst,” Al says.  “But just in case, you should probably reload all of the firearms first.”

That takes a couple minutes.  Then Sig selects a grenade, gazes around their vantage point critically, pulls the pin, and tosses.

Al shields his eyes.  He’s glad he still has that impulse, too.  He’ll need it later—soon.

“Thank you,” Al says, and he leaps down into the really very icky blast radius.  He reminds himself that this is a matter of life and death—or life and undeath, as the case may be—and claps his hand and slams his palms down on the spattered pavement.

The rough, simplistic, serviceable, walled pen that he creates from the road encircles all of the zombies but two.  Al makes himself a ladder in the side of the wall and clambers out, and then he goes over to the leaning lamppost and turns it into a narrow iron pathway from the bus to the top of the wall.  Sig sidles along it carefully and then snipes off the last two stragglers.

“Too stubborn to die, huh?” Sig asks as he joins Al on the broken sidewalk.

“And too scared,” Al says.

Sig pats his back and ignores the echo.

 

 

“Sir,” Riza says.

“M’awake,” Roy says, sitting up straight.

“Yes, sir,” Riza says.  “We’ve reached the outskirts of the city.”

“God,” Roy says, though it’s more like the opposite.

He was never stationed down here, but he’s passed through South City on a few occasions, and that’s enough grounds for comparison.

The day is fading fast, and there are no lights in any of the windows.  The streets are empty.  Trash drifts; cars have been abandoned.  It’s filthy and dark and silent. Evidently the death of the citizenry constitutes the death of the city.

Roy tears his eyes away from the slow decay and consults his watch.  They have fifteen minutes to wend their way to the center of the carnage and somehow fish Fullmetal out of the middle of the destruction.  At least one thing hasn’t changed.

Amberlyn rises slowly from the shadow as they close in.

“Stop,” Riza says.  “Lieutenant, stop the car.”

Havoc slams his foot on the brake as they crest the top of the low hill leading down to the Tower, and then Roy can see them, too—the sluggishly shifting shadows that make up a mindless crowd.

They used to be people.  They used to be people he’s sworn to protect.

“Lieutenants Havoc and Hawkeye,” Roy says, “when we get down there, cover me.  Second Lieutenant Breda, take the wheel.  Sergeant Fuery, keep scanning all of the channels for distress calls and for local broadcasts of any kind.  Warrant Officer Falman, I want you to come running with your arms full of ammunition if we need it.”

For once in his sad, insubordination-ridden life, he gets perfect unison: “Sir!”

“Move out,” he says.

 

 

“Damn it, Ed,” Izumi says.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Ed asks.

“That’s far too kind a description of what it did,” Izumi says.  “It kissed failure squarely on the mouth and then miraculously scraped by.”

“In other words,” Ed says, “it worked.”

Izumi cuffs his ear.

He probably deserved it this time.  The _transmute a grappling hook and a cord and zoom across to the next tall building over and then take their stairs down to the ground to escape from the zombies waiting at the bottom here_ plan was pretty solid in theory, but hanging onto the improvised pulley at high speed was a little trickier than he expected, and now he has a broken wrist and some broken glass to show for it.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the glass wasn’t _embedded_ in his hand.

But the point is that it worked, and now they’re down on the street, and they can look for Al and Sig again.  Whether or not Ed is essentially useless with one arm straight-up missing and the other one incapacitated.  Whether or not the rendezvous time is coming up fast.  The point is _Al_.

It’s really unsettling how things are always _almost_ -quiet here—anywhere, nowadays, but here is what he’s got.  No people, no cars, no bustle, no business.  Just entropy slowly, slowly, slowly tearing down everything that human beings have built.  Just the long, sauntering journey towards the end.  Just things crumbling over time, and the shadow of some unintelligent motion at the corner of your eye.  Just silence and irregular footsteps.

Ed tries very hard to manipulate the radio with his uncooperative fingers.  “C’mon… piece of shit… after all I’ve done for you?”

“Let me,” Izumi says.  She plucks it off his belt, smacks the heel of her hand sharply against the base, and _glares_ at it.

The radio fizzles with helpless static.

Izumi frowns, slightly less destructively, and fiddles with the dials.

“—roth—”

There’s a second where Ed can’t breathe.  Because he can’t breathe, he can’t say “Al”, can’t say “Yes”, can’t say “Holy crap, there _is_ a God, and occasionally he gives a fuck”.

“Al?” Izumi barks.  “Alphonse Elric, you listen to me—go to Amberlyn Tower.  It’s infested, but _go there_.  We’ll meet you.  Al, get to Amberlyn, _now_.  You hear me, young man?”

Ed has always found it very strange that alchemy took away the mother they wanted and then gave them the one they needed in order to move on.

“If you do not rendezvous and bring my saintly husband with you, so help me, I will _destroy_ you before the undead legions ever get close enough to nibble on your gauntlets.  _Do you hear me_?”

Ed doesn’t think it’s the static that makes it sound like Al’s voice is squeaking.  “—es, Teacher!”

Izumi snaps the radio back onto Ed’s belt with a very final _click_ , and then she squares her shoulders. With her back straight and her hair in disarray and a streak of dried blood at the corner of her mouth, she is fearsome and kind of beautiful.

“Good,” she says.  “Now let’s get your useless ass over there so that your damn fool colonel can play hero while the last of civilization collapses.”

“He’s not _my_ damn fool colonel,” Ed says.

After all that work to extricate themsleves, they’re headed right back into the middle of shit—it pretty much figures. Then again, fighting their way to Mustang when he (hopefully) roars up from one of the eastbound roads is an entirely different beast than fighting their way _out_ of Amberlyn would have been—and a significantly tamer one.

Ed wonders if it’s the _smell_. The whole block used to be apartments and residences and shit. Maybe it’s the lingering smell of the people. Maybe that’s why the thoughtless hunger makes the creatures cluster here.

The square in front of Amberlyn is _teeming_ with them. It’s hard to estimate the numbers with the light starting to fade, and frankly Ed doesn’t care. He’s just searching the gleams of half-coagulated blood and wet-peeling flesh for spikes of steel.

Izumi gives him a look that could kill a lesser man when he uses his elbow, his legs, and his decreased body weight to hook and swing his way up onto the awning of the hotel across the way from the Tower. Then the zombies at the edge of the crowd scent the pair of them and start staggering nearer, and she vaults up to join him.

“Any more bright ideas?” she asks, eyes on the grayish-purplish hands tugging at the scalloped fringe of the awning, too low to touch their feet so far.

“I’m thinking,” Ed says. “We still have that box of matches? And the water bottle?”

Izumi delves a hand into her impressively durable shoulder-bag. “Do you really think this is going to work?”

“I think it’s worth a shot,” Ed says.

Izumi ties Ed’s bandana over her face, tightens the knot, and lays out what’s left of their supplies. “ _A_ shot is all we’re going to get.”

Ed rummages around in his tired heart and turns up a smile. “Then we’d better make it count.”

 

 

“Teacher _did_ say ‘Amberlyn’?” Al asks, consulting the signpost. He wishes he could frown at it thoughtfully, but a finger to his chin will have to do.

Sig just nods. And that… helps, somehow. It helps to be with someone who doesn’t quibble, doesn’t waver, doesn’t sugarcoat and won’t ever fail. Sig is the best ally Al could have asked for, and even here—especially here—he’s grateful. He’s grateful that he has this man in his strange and tortured life.

He’s not grateful that these directional arrows are terribly misleading, however, or that it’s getting dark enough that they’re difficult to make out.

“I… think we’ll be coming in from the west,” Al says.  “If we take a right at the next major road, it shouldn’t be too far.”

No second-guessing—Sig just nods again.  He’s trusting Al with both their lives, and he has no doubts.

So Al tries to remember how it feels to hold one’s breath and leads the way, ever deeper into the heart of the corrupted city.

He hears the muted commotion before he can see anything.  There’s never any talking, of course, but every now and then, there’s a murmur; it’s mostly shuffling, rustling, weight hitting pavement as dying limbs flex decomposing muscles.

“Oh,” he says as they creep close enough to distinguish the size of the horde.  “Oh, dear.”

“Yeah,” Sig says, and he switches off the safety on his handgun.

“Hmm,” Al says as the zombies start to tilt their faces towards the air, catching wind of Sig’s beating blood.  “Would you stay close for a moment?”

Sig steps in by Al’s shoulder, and Al claps his hands and slaps them on the ground.  The nearest zombies groan faintly and swivel away from the brightness of the blue light as Al raises a broad pillar of stone under his and Sig’s feet, lifting them out of reach.

And then—

“ _Al_!”

The commotion on the opposite side of the square intensifies a little, and then—again, and Brother’s voice is hoarse but unmistakable—

“ _Al, over here!_ ”

And there’s Ed—perched atop a striped awning, flailing his left arm wildly, a small, sharp, pale beacon in the thickening night.  Sig tenses at Al’s shoulder—curled up by Ed’s knee, Teacher looks weak but unharmed.

“Hmm,” Al says.

“Not sure I like the sound of that,” Sig says.

“Don’t move,” Al says.  “And don’t panic.”

“Sure I _don’t_ like the sound of—”

Al spots an opening amongst the milling zombies and jumps down into it.  He concentrates hard on the mental array—he feels fortunate, sometimes, not to have to smell this, not to have a stomach turning or a heart clenching or eyes that can water—and claps his hands as he falls, dropping into a crouch as he lands and immediately spreading them on the pavement.  He thinks he hears a howl from Brother, but there’s no time to reassure him; Al surges upward on another column of reconfigured cement, and then he gauges the movement on the street below and leaps down into it again.  He imagines engraving the array in his mind, claps his hands, plants his feet for balance; the ground rises with his will once more.  It’s slow going, but it _is_ going.  He’s building a path.

He glances back as the next pillar rears upright—Sig has caught on and is following him, firing at any ambitious zombies that get too close for comfort.

Al’s almost there.  He’s tantalizingly near to Ed; just a few more leaps and a few more arrays, and—and—

He sinks to his knees to cushion the impact of the next jump, opening his palms—

—and something slams into his back, sending him tumbling forward, and the armor rings hollowly.

A dozen oozing, rotted hands grab at his spikes, at his hair, at his helmet—he’s struggling to pry himself away and push himself to his feet, but the combined weight of the assembled undead is one to be reckoned with; they’re _insistent_ —

Al bats away a reaching arm, flinging both of his own outward to shove the unsteady bodies _away_.  He clears just enough space to see the feeble stars, the rising yellow moon, and Brother—a streak of gold and black plummeting heedlessly from the awning with his teeth bared and his eyes alight.

“ _Brother, no_!” Al screams—far too late.

He has to get to Ed.  He has to get to Ed _first_ , before one of the _things_ does, before one bites him, cuts him, gets him, makes him into one of them—

Sometimes, Al is a realist.  Sometimes, Al is unashamed to admit that there are advantages to this body—to the consequences of his and Brother’s mistake.  Sometimes, Al is glad he can’t contract disease, can’t tire, can’t vomit, can’t cry.

Sometimes, Al is a hopelessly naïve little boy who would die before he let anything happen to the only family he has left.

And sometimes Al is both at once.

He drives his right fist through the abdomen of the zombie sagging heavily against his chest, and he uses the handhold to fling the body aside.  He just swipes the next two out of the way; no time for anything fancy; no need, with opponents who have lost the capacity to think.  The next he impales with his elbow; the next after that he accidentally decapitates with a sweeping blow.  The consistency of their flesh is all wrong, and something like disgust pulses dully in the part of Al that remembers viscera.  But there isn’t time—there isn’t time to pause and cry out; there isn’t time to look around himself; there isn’t time to redirect his path; there isn’t time to evaluate; there isn’t time to _think_ —Brother could be dead by now, undead by now, turning, changing, _gone_ —

Gore splatters, and Al can’t care.  Apparently panic is an emotion anchored by the soul—he doesn’t have a heart to pound, doesn’t have breath to catch, but he _feels_ it.

He shoves, kicks, swings, stabs, _moves_.  Brother’s alive.  Brother has to be alive.  After all this—the universe isn’t _that_ unfair—

Among the gray and the red and the shadow he sees a flash of yellow, and there isn’t time to think, isn’t time to calculate, isn’t time to force himself to emulate gentleness—he throws an arm around Ed’s waist and hauls him up out of the fray.  Ed keeps thrashing like a captured cat for a moment before he recognizes the ring of his boots hitting Al’s armor.

Al holds him aloft by the waist for a moment—for long enough to assess him, long enough to battle the dying light, long enough to flick his gaze over every dark spot and identify scum and dirt but no bleeding bite wounds.  There are gashes on Ed’s swollen arm and hand, but they’re clustered, deep and even, and they’re a few hours old.

“Idiot,” Ed says.

“ _Me_?” Al says.

A zombie grabs at Ed’s leg, so Al slings his brother up to sit on his shoulders.  Ed crouches there, curling his remaining arm around the front spike of Al’s helmet to hold himself steady.

“You’re so _dumb_ , Brother,” Al says, trying to push away the groaning corpses that are closing in from every side.  “Now what?”

“Now we take up religion,” Ed says.  “Start praying.”

“Praying for _what_?”

Distantly at first, and then louder, and then louder still, Al hears… an engine.

“That,” Ed says.

Al turns, Ed’s weight lurching with his momentum, in time to see the jeep screech to a stop.  All the doors fly open; half a dozen figures scramble out—

“ _Fullmetal_!” Colonel Mustang shouts.

“ _Here_!” Ed screams back.

And then he lifts the strange contraption he’s been cradling to his chest, and he fumbles a swollen finger to the trigger and pulls.

It’s a makeshift, alchemy-marked flare gun, and it fires searing light into the sky.

Colonel Mustang is barely distinguishable in the dark; he raises one pale hand—pale because it’s gloved—Al can’t hear the snap over the surrounding commotion, but—

The torrent of flame consumes everything, sparing a five-foot radius around Al’s body, roaring in against the pillar on which Sig is still perched.  Everything is blindingly bright, and somehow amongst the crackling Al hears Ed hissing through his teeth at the heat.

Then it’s dark again, and the whole square is a charnel-house of charred, motionless remains.

“Methane,” Mustang says into the sudden silence.  “One of the primary products of decomposition.  Highly flammable.”

“Duh,” Ed says.  He hops down before Al can stop him, and then he’s tossed the flare gun to the ash-strewn pavement and buried his face in Al’s chestplate.  “ _Fuck_ , I was scared.  Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

“ _Me_?” Al asks yet again.  “Brother, we need to have a talk about assigning blame and accepting responsibili—”

“Eew,” Ed says, drawing back.  He’s got a broad smear of… something… on his cheek.

“Oops,” Al says.  “Here.”  He takes up the corner of his apron and tries to use it to wipe Ed’s face.

By the time he’s more or less succeeded, Sig has leapt down and helped Izumi off of the awning, and the two of them are clinging to each other with typical gusto.  Colonel Mustang strolls over, flicking his cavalry skirt back in order to push his hands into his pockets.

“As touching as these reunions are,” he says as Lieutenant Hawkeye lowers her rifle and strides past him to the Curtises, “I think we’d best be going.”  He blinks.  “Fullmetal, where the hell is your other arm?  Wait, is this one _broken_?”

“No,” Ed says.  “My _wrist_ is, dumbass.”

“ _I’m_ the dumbass, Major Elric?  When _you’re_ the one who’s incapacitated himself in the midst of an apocalyptic pandemic?”

Al tilts his head back to intimate rolling his eyes as he heaves a sigh-sound.

On the upside, the stars are coming out.


End file.
